TALKING MANAGEMENT WITH: JOHN CLEESE -- Soldier of Convention or Agent of Change?; A Rebuff To the Ministry Of Silly Bosses

By ADAM BRYANT

Published: February 7, 1999

CHICAGO—
IT had all the ingredients of a Monty Python skit. John Cleese, launching into his keynote speech last Monday at a conference here on ways to improve learning and job performance, donned an orange clown wig to play Colin Cleese, the hard-nosed businessman who was interrupting his twin brother's remarks about hare brains and tortoise minds.

But unlike all those Monty Python skits in which Mr. Cleese cavorted, this one was not something completely different. It was, in fact, Mr. Cleese trying to pass along, as only he can, a good part of the best thinking about creativity and innovation he has come across in the more than 25 years that he has been making management training videos.

For those who know the classic ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' and ''Fawlty Towers'' television programs and films like ''A Fish Called Wanda'' -- but not his best-selling training video, ''Meetings, Bloody Meetings'' -- Mr. Cleese is a founder of Video Arts Ltd., a London-based maker of training materials. The company's videos have been used by more than 27,000 organizations, including I.B.M., AT&T and General Electric, and he has starred in more than 100 of its tapes.

The particular object of Mr. Cleese's enthusiasm these days is a book called ''Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind'' (Ecco Press, 1999) by Guy Claxton, an academic psychologist in Britain. Indeed, Mr. Cleese's desire to talk about the book explained his willingness to address the roughly 4,000 people who showed up for his speech at the Training '99 conference.

''Just occasionally I get that feeling that somebody has said something important and that I want to kind of put it out there,'' Mr. Cleese said after rehearsing his speech last weekend and then settling down for a discursive chat in his suite at the Four Seasons (his favorite hotel chain, but more on that later) with the Super Bowl playing in the background. (He was rooting for the Atlanta Falcons. ''One of the nicest English characteristics,'' he said, is to cheer on the underdog.)

In a nutshell, he said, Mr. Claxton describes the ''hare brain'' as logical, fast, machine-like thinking. The ''tortoise mind,'' on the other hand, is slower, less focused, less articulate, much more playful, almost dreamy. In his book, Mr. Claxton says the two sides need each other to come up with not just ideas, but good ideas. He also cites a number of studies suggesting that people should trust their hunches more.

The problem in business, Mr. Cleese said, is that three forces are leaving no room for the tortoise mind -- a ''terribly dangerous'' development, he said, that stifles creativity and innovation and inevitably leads to bad decisions.

Those forces, he said, are the widely held, but misguided, beliefs that being decisive means making decisions quickly, that fast is always better and that we should think of our minds as being like computers.

''Does anyone here seriously think that any of those statements are true?'' he asked the audience on Monday. ''Does anyone work for an organization that doesn't behave as though they were?'' The first question was met with silence, the second with knowing laughs.

Mr. Cleese said he learned one of the most important lessons of his years in the training business while preparing a film about decision-making, or ''decision-taking,'' as the British often call it. ''When there is a decision to be taken, the first question to ask always is: When does this decision need to be made? That's when you take the decision.'' After all, he explained, until that point, ''new information, unexpected developments and -- perish the thought -- better ideas might occur.''

THE pressure on managers at all levels to act quickly is enormous, he said. ''Although taking decisions very fast looks impressive, it is in fact not only show-off behavior, but actually a bit cowardly. It shows you'd rather give the impression of decisiveness than wait to substantially improve your chances of coming up with the right decision.''

Though many businesses act as if faster is better, Mr. Cleese told the audience, true urgency is the exception rather than the norm. Likewise, he bemoaned the single-minded approach that many businesses use to solve problems, which is to gather more data.

''Sadly, most of us today believe that a computer is of more use to us than a wise person,'' he said.

The tortoise mind needs the hare brain to analyze and sift through the ideas it serves up, of course, but Mr. Cleese said that pressures of all kinds -- deadlines, peers -- give license to the hare brain to bully the tortoise mind. So people need to make boundaries in time and space, like closing their door or going for a walk, to let their tortoise mind do its meandering work.

(This last point was made in a Monty Python sketch that Mr. Cleese helped write: Beethoven was struggling to compose the beginning of his Fifth Symphony, trying to get the fourth note right. The creative moment was interrupted by his wife, who walked in pushing a vacuum cleaner and asked if he had seen the sugar bowl.)

The notion that there are two sides to the brain -- the logical and the creative -- certainly sounds familiar. But that's part of the point, said Mr. Cleese, who has long been fascinated by the creative process. ''It's like a lot of important things people say, reminding us of things we used to know but we've forgotten,'' he said of Mr. Claxton's book. ''In a way I've always known this, but I've never seen it articulated so clearly.''

THE DYNAMICS of organizations and business have often served as fodder for Mr. Cleese's humor. During his Python years in the early 70's, for example, he was co-author of a skit about a charity whose good works involved putting things on top of other things. (As Mr. Cleese recalled the sketch, one of the charity's officials made an appeal for more donations by saying, ''There is still much work to be done.'')

And the ''Fawlty Towers'' series found its inspiration in the British attitude toward providing service, which Mr. Cleese describes this way: '' 'If there weren't all these customers, we could run this place properly.' ''

His take on bad service has also informed many Video Arts tapes. In one, Mr. Cleese plays an impatient repairman who is quizzing a customer about a noisy appliance. ''Well, what kind of noise?'' he asks. ''A rasping noise, a metallic whanging din, a pululating wheeze, an intermittent nonrhythmic banging?''

In person, Mr. Cleese is friendly and candid, and appears to relish kicking around ideas and noodling over big-picture questions. He often uses literary allusions, and sprinkles in words like ''adumbrate,'' not to impress but to get across a precise image. Though his hair is graying, and a sore back would prevent him these days from re-creating his famous ''Ministry of Silly Walks'' skit, he shows a youthful enthusiasm for everything from a workaday pass reception to bizarre stories that he clearly enjoys retelling.

Mr. Cleese has been spending a lot of time with his tortoise mind lately. He is planning to retire at the end of the year, when he turns 60. He will not stop working, mind you; rather, he has been arranging his affairs in recent years so that making money will no longer be a factor in deciding which interests he will pursue. (He is still committed to working several days a year for Video Arts).

So in between providing encouragement to the hapless Falcons, Mr. Cleese happily shared his thoughts last weekend on everything from hotel service (yes, yes, that's coming soon) to management and leadership.

Mr. Cleese, who received a law degree from Cambridge University about six years before helping form the Python troupe, is quick to say he is no expert on management; he is much more likely to peruse the psychology and philosophy sections of a bookstore than the business section. But he has grown steadily more interested in the field since he first started doing training films with Anthony Jay, an executive with the BBC who conceived of the ''Yes, Minister'' television series.

Mr. Cleese said that Mr. Jay grew interested in the training field after seeing some British Army films that used humor to get across points about safety, among other things. Their early efforts together focused mostly on techniques of retail sales.

''It was extraordinarily interesting to sit down with someone and have them spill the beans about how you're supposed to do it,'' Mr. Cleese recalled. ''You've been on the end of the process hundreds of times, and then, forever after, you go into the shops and you know what's going on.''

HE also became interested in the dynamics of meetings. ''I've had the misfortune to sit through many Python meetings, which are probably at the very bottom of the efficient-meeting scale, or at least they used to be,'' he said, adding that the surviving troupe members -- Graham Chapman died in 1989 -- occasionally get together to discuss reuniting for a run of shows. The main problem, he said, was the constant revisiting of decisions that had already been made: ''There was no sense of progress. It was just chaos.''

While doing research for a video on conducting job interviews, he learned the importance of asking applicants the kind of difficult questions that many people avoid for fear of appearing confrontational. When he is interviewing people to work for him -- on a movie set or as one of the personal assistants he calls his ''vice bosses'' -- Mr. Cleese said he is particularly interested in whether the person has an appreciation of his strengths and weaknesses.

''I look for a kind of self-awareness in people,'' he said. ''And if I sense it's not there, then I begin to lose interest in whatever their qualifications are. I don't want to work with someone who is a very efficient robot.''

Mr. Cleese said that as a manager, he is always delegating. ''I give people a great deal of authority, and it has a great deal to do with the fact that I can't stand detail,'' he explained. ''I'm fundamentally lazy, so the more things operate without me, the happier I am. My motivation is a base one, which is to reduce my workload.''

In his book ''Life and How to Survive It,'' (Norton, 1994), written with Robin Skynner, whose group therapy sessions he used to attend, Mr. Cleese concludes that great leaders make themselves dispensable by creating organizations that basically function without them. That, of course, is not the model typically found in American business, where corporate publicity machines often create the sense that the chief executive is the main reason for a company's success.

''Anytime I see ego being manifested, it worries me,'' Mr. Cleese said. ''I'm all for people having a great vision, but does anyone else in the corporation have a great vision?''

One of his favorite business books is ''In Search of Excellence,'' the 1982 best seller by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, because, Mr. Cleese said, it is really a book about what motivates people.

''If you give people authority, and you treat them with real dignity, and you listen to them and ask them how things could be done better, I think that money becomes secondary,'' he said. ''But once you get a stock market like the American stock market, then the company is immediately put into a context in which it's very hard for it to behave like that.''

MR. CLEESE groups companies into two broad categories -- those that seem to operate with confidence and those that run on fear. A few years ago, he guessed that about half of all large companies fit into each category. Today, he figures that about 95 percent run on fear.

In dealing with a company -- one that has asked him to give a presentation to its employees or to make a commercial, for instance -- it usually takes him about three phone calls to determine which kind it is. A telltale sign, he said, is that in fear-based companies, it is almost always impossible to tell who is responsible for making a decision.

Hence his admiration for the Four Seasons hotels, the antithesis of the Fawlty Towers approach to hostelry. The chain, he said, takes great care in hiring its staff, particularly those on the concierge desk. The workers never give off the sense that anything is a bother, he said, and they seem to really enjoy helping. ''I find that strangely touching,'' he added.

Through the years, his experiences in hotels have provided some wonderful stories. He says he always has to remind himself to put the ''Do Not Disturb'' card on his door or otherwise face an endless procession of people knocking, delivering luggage and asking to turn down the bed. One time, he said, there was a knock, despite the sign hanging on the handle. He opened the door. ''Is this supposed to be out here?'' the hotel staffer asked, pointing at the card.

''That's the kind of line you can't write,'' Mr. Cleese said.

On another occasion, he recalled, he arrived with Alan Coren, a former editor of Punch, the weekly British magazine of satire, cartoons and reviews, on a snowy December night at a hotel in eastern Scotland. A doorman, not inclined to help with the luggage, demanded, ''Have you booked?'' The next day, they learned they were the only ones in the hotel.

At the same hotel, Mr. Coren was in the bathroom when he heard the door to his room open and his breakfast tray being set down. The female staff member then opened the door to the bathroom, saying (imagine one of Mr. Cleese's high-pitched Python voices here), ''Ooh, I wondered where you were,'' and then left.

''There's a particular kind of insanity on the east coast of Scotland that is very special, very delicate,'' Mr. Cleese said.

BUT he finds the insanity he sees so often in the business world these days less endearing. ''I think there is huge amount of anxiety out there and not so many people enjoying themselves,'' he said.

Mr. Cleese is intent on remaining among those who do enjoy themselves, but he is taking some tortoise time to decide precisely what his next steps will be.

''The truth is, I don't know where I go now,'' he said. ''If you try to plan with your hare brain, you'll think along the lines of what you've done before. The only way that you find a slightly new direction at this kind of juncture is to create a space and see what flows into it.''

Photos: ''And Now for Something Completely Managerial'' -- ''The Balance Sheet Barrier'' explains finance in everyday language. Demystification is a common thread in Mr. Cleese's own philosophy. The best-selling video ''Meetings, Bloody Meetings.'' (Mr. Cleese rates Monty Python's meeting efficiency as ''probably at the very bottom.''); In training videos like ''The Helping Hand,'' John Cleese, formerly of ''Monty Python,'' tackles serious management topics in an antic way. (Photographs From Coastal Training Technologies); For a speech last week at the Training '99 conference in Chicago, John Cleese donned a wig and the persona of Colin Cleese to illustrate hare brains and tortoise minds, a dichotomy that he is applying to business. (Steve Kagan for The New York Times)(pg. 14)